This Is Where Taco Bell’s “Missing” Twitter Account Has Gone

Did the fast food chain really dump its Twitter followers & start over? Nope -- it just renamed its account to keep them safe during a promotion.

Today, Taco Bell made a dramatic move by “going dark” on its social media accounts, including making its seem like its Twitter account had started over, dumping over one million followers. But now Marketing Land found where the “real” Taco Bell Twitter account made its run for the border.

The account, which previously had 1.4 million followers is now down to around 1,500. Here’s how it used to look, according to Google’s cached copy:

So wow — did Taco Bell really dump all those followers for what’s likely to be a one-day stunt? No. As Matt Navarra, social media director of the The Next Web, pointed out, it seemed likely that Taco Bell just renamed its old account to keep all of its followers, and when the promotion is done, it will rename it back:

@martinbeck so all tweets and followers maintained on its old (changed name) main account which is now protected. New act verified now BTW

If so, that means the old account should be lurking out there with all of Taco Bell’s old tweets and still retaining its followers. And it is, under the name of @totallynothere:

You can see that the last two tweets match what was previously on the Taco Bell account, plus this account has 1.4 million followers. I also know it’s the Taco Bell account because I was shown as following it. Previously, I’d been following Taco Bell under the Taco Bell name. So, when the account was renamed, I continued to follow it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is how quickly Twitter itself acted to make the “new” Taco Bell account verified. If an verified account is renamed, it loses its verified status. That’s why the old account no longer has the blue verified checkmark.

The new account also lacked this initially, but now it has one. That means either Twitter went out-of-its-way to help Taco Bell as part of this promotion when asked or decided it had better make it verified to reassure people that the fake Taco Bell account was really real. Well, you know what I mean.